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Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities

Eric Lewis Beverley

To cite this article: Eric Lewis Beverley (2011) Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities, Social
History, 36:4, 482-497, DOI: 10.1080/03071022.2011.618286

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Social History Vol. 36 No. 4 November 2011

REVIEW ESSAY

Eric Lewis Beverley

Colonial urbanism and

South Asian cities*

In Gillo Pontecorvo’s landmark 1966 film, the French colonial city of Algiers strikes a dramatic
posture, split in two by a fortified barrier administered by imperial forces.1 The cordon sanitaire
between the European quarter and the ‘native’ qasba partitions the disciplined spaces of the
colonial city, setting apart what appear to the moviegoer as materializations of radically
different concepts and histories of urban design, planning and sociality. This enforced physical
and cultural incommensurability between ‘white town’ and ‘black town’ encapsulates a
powerful stereotype that inflects urban history research on a range of empires, places and
times.2
The paradigmatic image of the racially partitioned colonial city has been dismantled in
recent scholarship on British India as more a figure of political desire on the part of colonial
administrators than an accurate description of urban cultural geography.3 Mounting evidence
of the ‘dual city’ model’s limitations provides an opportunity to reconsider to what extent

*I wish to thank the editors and anonymous Rabinow, ‘Techno-cosmopolitanism: governing

reviewers for Social History (and particularly Larry
Frohman, who commissioned this essay). Many of
the arguments were worked out and sharpened in
conversations and debates with friends and collea-
gues, several under the auspices of the Boston-area
Urban South Asia reading group, and thanks are
due to its convenors, Michael M. J. Fischer and
Shekhar Krishnan, and the numerous enthusiastic
participants. For edifying discussions and helpful
suggestions, I would also like to thank Manan
Ahmed, Prachi Deshpande, Doug Haynes, Nikhil
Rao and Svati Shah.
1
G. Pontecorvo, director of La battaglia di Algeri
[The Battle of Algiers] (Italy, 1966).
2
On boundaries in French colonial cities in
North Africa, see J. Abu-Lughod, Rabat: Urban
Apartheid in Morocco (Princeton, 1980) and P.
Morocco’ in P. Rabinow, French Modern: Norms
and Forms of the Social Environment (Chicago, 1995),
277–319. See also J. Abu-Lughod, ‘Tale of two
cities: the origins of modern Cairo’, Comparative
Studies in Society and History, VII, 4 (1965), 429–57.
For classic elaborations of the ‘dual city’ model, see
S. J. Lewandowski, ‘Urban growth and municipal
development in the colonial city of Madras, 1860–
1900’, Journal of Asian Studies, XXXIV, 2 (1975),
341–60 and S. M. Neild, ‘Colonial urbanism: the
development of Madras City in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries’, Modern Asian Studies, XIII, 2
(1979), 217–46.
3
See especially S. Chattopadhyay, Representing
Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial
Uncanny (London, 2005).

Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online ª 2011 Taylor & Francis
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03071022.2011.618286
November 2011 Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities 483
colonial urbanism constituted a coherent set of ideas and practices. The current essay surveys
several recent books on modern South Asian urban history that represent, perhaps, the first
wave of a major emerging field in the historiography of the region.4 All of these works provide
rich material for considering the transformation of cities there during the colonial period.
Rather than describing a fixed material form or attributing unified instrumentality to the
making and governance of cities, it develops a thematic and descriptive account of trends that
shaped urban worlds in the colonial subcontinent. These dynamics suggest that urbanism in
colonial South Asia was fundamentally about spatial segregation of populations.
Colonial South Asian cities inscribed social and economic hierarchies upon expanding
urban terrain. These hierarchies were constructed out of different overlapping social divisions.
One can trace a broad trend over colonial history wherein racialized understandings of the city
were gradually displaced by class divisions. Urban segregation during the colonial period, as I
suggest, is a key antecedent for forms of class segregation (often overlapping with religious,
ethno-linguistic or caste segregation) that structure postcolonial South Asian cities, their
neighbourhoods and suburbs.
I begin by sketching the historiographic context that frames recent work on major South
Asian colonial cities. Next, I consider cities as spaces of social control, tracing symbolic and
material ways in which the Raj ordered urban spaces and their inhabitants. Shifting angles, the
subsequent section looks at cities as spaces of autonomy, examining formal and informal modes
and institutional spaces of contestation, negotiation and transgression of colonial urbanist
projects. Working from these two understandings of South Asian cities during British rule, I
recast the chronology and salient characteristics of colonial urbanism.

HISTORIOGRAPHY
Colonial period South Asian cities have – for a number of reasons – long been peripheral in
humanistic and social scientific scholarship. First, the bulk of the subcontinent’s population was
historically rural, and urban population expansion since the mid-twentieth century is only
recently garnering widespread scholarly attention.5 Second, Gandhian nationalist thought, still
hugely influential, tends to regard the village as heart and soul of the subcontinent, and the city

4
I consider in detail the following books:
Chattopadhyay, op. cit.; W. J. Glover, Making
Lahore Modern: Constructing and Imagining a Colonial
City (Minneapolis, 2007); S. Hazareesingh, The
Colonial City and the Challenge of Modernity: Urban
Hegemonies and Civic Contestations in Bombay City
1900–1925 (New Delhi, 2007); P. Kidambi, The
Making of an Indian Metropolis: Colonial Governance
and Public Culture in Bombay, 1890–1920 (Aldershot,
2007); and S. Legg, Spaces of Colonialism: Delhi’s
Urban Governmentalities (Malden, MA, 2007).
Other works that fit within the emerging canon
of modern South Asian urban history include J.
Nair, The Promise of the Metropolis: Bangalore’s
Twentieth Century (New Delhi, 2005); J. Hosa-
grahar, Indigenous Modernities: Negotiating Architec-
ture and Urbanism (London, 2005); G. Prakash,
Mumbai Fables (Princeton, 2010); P. Chopra, A
Joint Enterprise: Indian Elites and the Making of British
Bombay (Minneapolis, 2011); and N. R. Rao,
House But No Garden: Apartment Living in Bombay’s
Suburbs, 1898–1964 (Minneapolis, forthcoming).
5
The increased attention owes something to the
straining of urban resources and infrastructures in
recent decades, but also to late 1990s popular and
academic interest in ‘globalization’ and ‘global
cities’. See, inter alia, M. Castells, The Informational
City: Information Technology, Economic Restructuring,
and the Urban–Regional Process (Oxford, 1989); S.
Sassen, The Global City: New York, London, Tokyo
(Princeton, 1991 and 2001); A. Appadurai, Mod-
ernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization
(Minneapolis, 1996); and M. Davis, Planet of Slums
(London, 2006). The surge of scholarly interest in
484 Social History vol. 36 : no. 4
as imposed colonial modernist perversion. The focus on ‘village India’ long remained a staple
in postcolonial political discourse on India (the dominant nation-state in the region in terms of
population, geopolitical and economic heft, and visibility in popular and scholarly writings).
Glorification of the rural as authentic essence, and derision of the urban as western imposition,
dovetail neatly with orientalist predilections that shaped early historical research on South Asia.
With several notable exceptions, historical scholarship on modern South Asia before the late
1990s inherited this legacy and displays a rural orientation.6
In studies empirically grounded in urban areas the city often appeared as an inert setting
where other subjects could be traced. Such scholarship focused not on cities as such, but
viewed them as arenas for colonial economic and political domination,7 anti-colonial and
nationalist organization,8 or as ethnographic sites.9
Several of the works alluded to above provide crucial foundations for exploring
colonialism’s implications for South Asian urban history. While often not their explicit
purpose, studies located in urban spaces have shown how cities structured (and were
themselves shaped by) conflicts, exchanges and movements that characterized the colonial
period in South Asia. The debate between Dipesh Chakrabarty and Rajnarayan Chandavarkar
over the role of culture in the making of colonial labour worlds positioned Calcutta and
Bombay as crucibles where state subjects were thrust into relations of capitalist production for
global markets.10 Likewise, David Arnold’s work on the police presented Madras city as a

cities was linked to a revival of older theoretical
writings on urbanism, such as W. Benjamin, The
Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, 1999) and H.
Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford, 1991).
6
On the late development of urban historical
scholarship in South Asia and its descriptive rather
than analytical focus, see Nair, op. cit., 4–8. On
South Asian cities as a subject of historical analysis,
see Kidambi, op. cit., 2–8. In addition to those
discussed and categorized below, earlier works that
consider different aspects of modern South Asian
urban history include books like K. L. Gillion,
Ahmedabad: A Study in Indian Urban History
(Berkeley, 1968), N. Gupta, Delhi Between Two
Empires, 1803–1931: Society, Government and Urban
Growth (Delhi, 1981) and M. Dossal, Imperial
Designs and Indian Realities: The Planning of Bombay
City, 1845–1875 (Bombay, 1991), and edited
volumes such as J. S. Grewal and I. Banga (eds),
Studies in Urban History (Amritsar, 1981) and H.
Spodek and D. M. Srinivisan (eds), Urban Form and
Meaning in South Asia: The Shaping of Cities from
Prehistoric to Precolonial Times (Washington, DC,
1993).
7
Among works on labour and industrial history,
on Calcutta see D. Chakrabarty, Rethinking Work-
ing-Class History: Bengal, 1890–1940 (Princeton,
1989) and L. Fernandes, Producing Workers: The
Politics of Gender, Class, and Culture in the Calcutta
Jute Mills (Philadelphia, 1997). See also, on
Bombay, R. Chandavarkar’s two works, The
Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business
Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900–
1940 (Cambridge, 1994) and Imperial Power and
Popular Politics: Class, Resistance and the State in
India, c. 1850–1950 (Cambridge, 1998), and M. D.
Morris, The Emergence of an Industrial Labor Force in
India: A Study of the Bombay Cotton Mills, 1854–
1947 (Berkeley, 1965). On Ahmedabad see M.
Mehta, The Ahmedabad Cotton Textile Industry:
Genesis and Growth (Ahmedabad, 1982).
8
C. A. Bayly, The Local Roots of Indian Politics:
Allahabad, 1880–1920 (Oxford, 1975) and Rulers,
Townsmen, and Bazaars: North Indian Society in the
Age of British Expansion, 1770–1870 (Cambridge,
1983); D. E. Haynes, Rhetoric and Ritual in Colonial
India: The Shaping of a Public Culture in Surat City,
1852–1928 (Berkeley, 1991); G. Johnson, Provincial
Politics and Indian Nationalism: Bombay and the
Indian National Congress, 1880 to 1915 (Cambridge,
1973); J. Masselos, Towards Nationalism: Group
Affiliations and the Politics of Public Associations in
Nineteenth Century Western India (Bombay, 1974).
9
F. Conlon, A Caste in a Changing World: The
Chitrapur Saraswat Brahmans, 1700–1935 (Berkeley,
1977); K. I. Leonard, Social History of an Indian
Caste: The Kayasths of Hyderabad (Berkeley, 1978).
10
See Chakrabarty, op. cit. and Chandavarkar, op.
cit. 1998.
November 2011 Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities 485
prime arena where colonial institutions manifest characteristic dominance and coercion.11
Scholarship on nationalism and culture underscored the role of urban centres as loci of
negotiation and contestation. Jim Masselos’s writings on Bombay highlighted the centrality of
the emerging municipal sphere in the making of nationalist politics.12 Douglas Haynes cast
Surat as a key centre for fashioning new forms of publicity, sociality and domesticity.13
Research on labour, police, nationalism and the public sphere began to identify the particular
material, institutional and popular constitution of the urban in colonial South Asia.
Some pre-1990s works explicitly on urban history laid the foundations of a narrative that
recent scholarship has sought to complicate. Anthony King described colonial cities as
frameworks for organizing racially different groups into divided but interdependent zones.
King illustrated this dual structure with sketches of military settlements (cantonments), civil
stations (especially the prevalent imperial domestic form: the bungalow) and hill stations.14
Veena Oldenburg’s work on mid-nineteenth-century Lucknow showed that cities were foci
for imperial reorganization and control of social and political space.15 In Lucknow, discourses
of security and sanitation established clear demarcations between colonial areas and the Indian
town. Oldenburg’s book detailed the particular processes and discourses that constituted
colonial urbanism as a segregative regime.16
The scholarship considered above provided a loose framework for the history of modern
South Asian cities. Since the late 1990s researchers have increasingly taken up the project of
writing explicitly urban histories.17 The following sections of this essay consider several key
recent books that engage with the city as a discrete historical subject.

CITIES AS SPACES OF SOCIAL CONTROL

From one perspective, colonial urbanism functioned as a means of and reason for social control
and segregation. This section provides a broad chronology and a thematic account of the
repertoire of technologies constituting South Asian colonial urbanism, incorporating practices
such as military occupation, the dual city model and colonizer–colonized spatial segregation,
discourses of public health and sanitation, planning and improvement projects, and urban
policing. I also note gradual modal shifts in colonial disciplinary attitudes towards the city,
from the control of spaces to the regulation of bodies. Even as the body increasingly became
the site of application of colonial urbanism, practices of segregation of space remain crucial
through the colonial and into the postcolonial period.

11
D. Arnold, Police Power and Colonial Rule,
Madras, 1859–1947 (Delhi, 1986).
12
Masselos, op. cit. See also J. Masselos, The City in
Action: Bombay Struggles for Power (New Delhi,
2007).
13
Haynes, op. cit.
14
A. D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture,
Social Power, and Environment (London, 1976). On
hill stations, see D. K. Kennedy, The Magic
Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj (Berke-
ley, 1996).
15
V. T. Oldenburg, The Making of Colonial
Lucknow, 1856–1877 (Princeton, 1984).
16
On ‘indigenous patterns’ and ‘European pat-
terns’ of urban development, see J. E. Brush, ‘The
morphology of Indian cities’ in R. Turner (ed.),
India’s Urban Future (Berkeley, 1962), 57–70. For a
typology of British colonial cities, see T. R.
Metcalf, ‘Imperial towns and cities’ in P. J.
Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge Illustrated History of
the British Empire (Cambridge, 2001), 224–53.
17
G. Prakash, ‘The urban turn’, in The Cities
of Everyday Life, Sarai reader II (New Delhi,
Amsterdam, 2002), 2–7.
486 Social History vol. 36 : no. 4
Policies related to maintaining a military presence played a foundational and enduring role
in fixing colonial urban power. British forces advanced and consolidated empire, and the
establishment of garrisons represented the primary iteration of colonial urbanism. Cities were
organized to enable military intervention when necessary and to safeguard the needs and
ensure the discipline of soldiers. Permanent military stations – initially walled forts, later
sprawling cantonments – were the classic forms of spatial segregation under the Raj. Military
areas combined with civil stations for European residences and institutions to form what
during the early colonial period was imagined as the inviolable ‘white town’. Cantonments
were nerve centres for instilling discipline and exercising control.18 While people and ideas
constantly transgressed the sections of the split colonial city, the division of zones was decisive
as both ideology and material practice.
From the late nineteenth century, the conceptual architecture of bounded zones began to
break down. However, hierarchies defined by class and occupation, which in part replicated
colonizer–colonized racial boundaries, were maintained across space through discourses of
bodily regulation. These were deployed in the name of sanitation and public health to contain
labouring and sexualized bodies within certain spaces of the city.19 Though physical coercion
remained central in urban governance, symbolic forms of power were increasingly inscribed
upon the built form of cities. Recent works by Glover, Chattopadhyay, Kidambi and Legg
effectively move beyond the dual city narrative by providing accounts of cities as technologies
and spaces of social control.
William Glover’s study of Lahore examines the articulation between symbolic power over
space and the continuing production of regimes of segregation.20 His architectural history of
the prime city of the Punjab region identifies the role of the built environment in shaping a
colonial milieu that combined imperial domination with the ostensible improvement of the
colonized population. Glover describes a ‘colonial spatial imagination’ that sought to integrate
colonial society and its material forms (28–31). The book presents cities as key structures for
conditioning everyday experiences of empire.
The Raj’s cities projected the image of enlightened and improving liberal governance, but
worked via the production of highly segregated and disciplined spaces. Glover locates the space
of engagement outside the overwhelmingly native old city, viewed by British officials as
immune to civilizing intervention and potential source of political unrest if tampered with
(52–7). Rather, he looks to construction projects in undeveloped areas and the expanding civil
station zone, where officials could build unencumbered by the existing native city. Urban
pedagogy sought to ‘improve’ Lahore’s social and architectural life via new built forms. Glover
discusses the pretensions to ‘exemplary urbanism’ represented by settlements for colonially
designated criminal tribes. These towns were built in the 1880s on an ordered grid pattern,

18
See Oldenburg, op. cit.; N. Gupta, ‘Military
security and urban development: a case study of
Delhi 1857–1912’, Modern Asian Studies, V, 1
(1971), 61–77; and Hosagrahar, op. cit., on the
planning of military cantonments in the remaking
of colonial cities. For a critique of the ‘dual city’
model, described as the ‘black town/fort dichot-
omy’, based on an analysis of burial practices and
suburbs in Patna, see R. M. Brown, ‘The
cemeteries and the suburbs’, Journal of Urban
History, XXIX, 2 (2003), 151–72.
19
On spatial regulation of sex workers, see K.
Ballhatchet, Race, Sex, and Class Under the Raj:
Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793–
1905 (London, 1980) and A. Tambe, Codes of
Misconduct: Regulating Prostitution in Late Colonial
Bombay (Minneapolis, 2009).
20
Glover, op. cit.
November 2011 Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities 487
which officials saw as a formative model for instilling discipline in the congenitally unruly (42–
4). Raj officials designed new spaces to instil moral and rational qualities through ordered
structures and clear lines of sight, in contrast to the durable opacity and attendant degeneracy
of existing urban spaces (48).
Like colonies and settlements in undeveloped areas, building projects in Lahore’s civil
station deployed architecture as a technology for advancing colonial designs for the subject
population. Despite being British-dominated elite landscapes, newly constructed spaces in the
civil station were meant to encourage mixing between colonizers and colonized, and to have a
transformational effect on Indians. Glover analyses the symbolic resonance and intended
educative and socializing effects of a ‘collaborative landscape’ composed of banquet halls,
colleges, clock tower, zoo, botanical garden and courthouse (60–79). He also traces the linked
development of a programme of pedagogy to train architects from among the growing Punjabi
middle class (79–91). These projects combined to produce new collaborators in empire and to
convey an impression of inclusiveness and imperial benevolence.
Swati Chattopadhyay’s book on Calcutta in the early nineteenth century sketches the
relationship between colonial ideologies and urban policies in a manner akin to Glover’s
approach.21 She argues that British ideas about the native town developed in dialogue with
colonial interventions there. Just as Chattopadhyay repudiates the white town/black town
model as a useful empirical description of the city, she elaborates its functions as a productive
idea for advancing colonial urbanism. While her overall concern is to ‘problematize
representation of the city’ rather than to provide empirical description, Chattopadhyay’s book
nevertheless explores structures of power in colonial Calcutta (3).
Chattopadhyay traces a discursive continuity between artistic and literary representations of
the city, which marked Calcutta as a ‘pathological space’, and technologies such as health maps
(23). The latter provided a means to translate racist ideas inherent in literary accounts of the
city into practical discourses of governance. Health maps drew upon ethnographic data and
theories of disease to present a template for colonial officials to reorganize and regulate city
space (70–3). These urbanist practices undermined the notion of fundamental separation
between the unruly native and protected British cities by identifying the mobile native body as
site of disease and infection (74). By emphasizing the wide scope of colonial urban power,
Chattopadhyay shows that city space was not so neatly divided as colonial representations
implied. She presents colonial urbanism as an intrinsically racialized set of practices, which
conceived the native body as mobile, contagious and threatening. The language of public
health, as Chattopadhyay shows, was crucial in the making of colonial Calcutta over the
nineteenth century, and remained so elsewhere in subsequent years.
Prashant Kidambi’s book on colonial Bombay diagnoses a mounting urban crisis.22 He
charts the city’s emergence as an industrial metropolis that neglected to develop the social
infrastructure for burgeoning working-class areas, resulting in problems of governance. This
drove a ‘fundamental shift in political rationalities’ wherein the colonial state shifted from an
attitude of disinterest in urban governance beyond European zones to one of active
intervention in native localities. There had been no firm white town/black town boundary
since the 1860s destruction of the ramparts surrounding the British fort. However, the city was
divided by an esplanade separating predominantly poor native areas to the north from a zone of

21 22
Chattopadhyay, op. cit. Kidambi, op. cit.
488 Social History vol. 36 : no. 4
concentrated colonial and native wealth and institutional buildings in the south of the island
city (34–5). Kidambi documents increasing colonial and elite Indian concerns about the
‘unintended city’ to the north, which was not under the purview of state intervention (36).
This began with the foundation of the municipality in 1865, which was largely ineffective until
an epidemic disease crisis near century’s end (36–48).
Attempts to control the 1896 plague outbreak entailed a thrust of state power into Bombay’s
native localities (chapter 3). The Indian Plague Commission spearheaded a powerful assault
against ‘insanitary neighbourhoods’ in Bombay (67). What had been a crisis response during
the plague era settled into a broader policy of urban renewal and planning initiated by the
Bombay Improvement Trust into the twentieth century.23 The Trust, founded in 1898, drew
on English and Scottish models, identified slums as the source of disease, and fixed on both
poor neighbourhoods and the bodies of their inhabitants as loci of intervention (71–2). The
Improvement Trust, often challenged by Indian landlords or shop-owners, and the Bombay
Municipal Corporation, largely failed to deliver on its mandate to enact a sanitary city with
sufficient housing for its burgeoning populace (82–5, 97–8, 102–12). If public health discourse
authorized colonial interventions in Bombay’s localities, collective violence by the turn of the
century justified continued police presence and violence throughout the industrializing city
(chapter 5). Treating these developments chronologically, Kidambi charts the increasingly
intrusive role of state power, wielded by colonists and later Indian elites, in South Asian urban
space.
In Chattopadhyay’s Calcutta and Kidambi’s Bombay, a picture begins to emerge of colonial
urbanism’s developing repertoire of rhetoric and practices. Sanitary threat and contagion were
identified as key urban problems, and located in the neighbourhoods and dwellings, and later
in the bodies, of the poorer segments of the subject population.24 Official agencies of urban
power presided over by British officers and later native elites targeted these spaces and groups.
These works identify key shifts, but demonstrate that hierarchies of race and class continued to
shape colonial urbanism. As such, a modified version of the dual city model – split between
elites (initially European, increasingly Indian) within a plethora of protected zones with
permeable boundaries, and subordinates (marginalized Indian groups) primarily residing
outside these areas – remained evident throughout the colonial period. The construction of a
new colonial capital amid a dense, poor, north Indian city in the early twentieth century
underscores the continuing prevalence of spatialized hierarchies in colonial urbanism.
Stephen Legg’s book on the making of New Delhi, like Glover’s account of Lahore, casts
the colonial city as ‘showcase of imperial sovereignty and modernity’. 25 Legg sketches the
contours of colonial urban governance in Delhi, drawing on plans for responding to everyday
and extraordinary threats to public order to reveal officials’ and planners’ concerns. Viewing
the city from the perspective of an increasingly embattled colonial state reveals how urban
governance inscribed powerful notions of hierarchy upon urban space.

23
On class alliances and enduring tensions between excreta in a changing urban environment during
the Trust and the municipality, see S. Hazaree- the nineteenth century’, Studies in History, XXIII, 1
singh, The Colonial City, op. cit., chap. 1, and (2007), 1–32.
25
Kidambi, op cit., chap. 4. Legg, Spaces, op. cit., 1, 29.
24
See Nair, op. cit., 48–51 and M. Mann, ‘Delhi’s
belly: on the management of water, sewage and
November 2011 Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities 489
Concerns about imperial security in Delhi were manifest in ‘obsession with boundaries and
segregation’ (46). A chapter on housing for government employees in the new capital details
policies of residential ordering by salary: higher-paid employees were located closer to the
government centre (43, 45). While notionally based on rank, dominance of Europeans over
high government service positions resulted in a scenario of ‘racial difference masquerading as
class difference’ (53). The correspondence of rank to race, and in turn to location, only
gradually broke down with the ‘Indianization’ of colonial administration over the first half of
the twentieth century (53).
Hierarchical spatial arrangements were complemented by security schemes designed to
segregate native spaces – particularly the old city – from the new imperial capital. Anxieties
about crime and contagion, expressed in discourses of urban order and sanitation, authorized
the making of a glacis, or cleared space, as a borderland between the old and new city (46, 56).
To address threats of nationalist agitation in the 1930s, the Raj sought to discipline bodies and
sentiments in the capital (82). Techniques included conveying the ‘impression of constant
surveillance’ and deployment of urban warfare vehicles, planes and tear gas (84, 104–7). Legg
suggests that this ‘theatricality of urban discipline’ was meant to produce a pacifying ‘moral
effect’ among the population (105). In an analysis of colonial plans for combating nationalist
uprisings, Legg demonstrates that the physically separated spaces of New Delhi and Old Delhi
were to be administered jointly under military counter-insurgency procedures (96).
Even as Delhi was conceived as a unified theatre of control in schemes for pacifying anti-
colonial agitators, the urban landscape was partitioned into zones to facilitate policing (88). As
such, police practice disaggregated Delhi into sections defined by race, class and community.
Legg shows that urban maps presenting spatially the demographics and potential for disorder of
various areas were a key disciplinary technology (128–48). Police maps described the borders
between Hindu and Muslim areas, and they were linked to counter-insurgency schemes.
These maps were designed to facilitate the unrestrained deployment of state violence towards
controlling the unruly elements of the subject population while protecting the ruling elite.
In Legg’s Delhi, the social hierarchies underlying colonial urbanism continued to carve out
spaces of focus and inscribe separate disciplinary zones into the mid-twentieth century. In
keeping with critiques such as Chattopadhyay’s of the dual city model, segregation in colonial
Delhi was far more complex than the impression conveyed by a model of hermetically
bounded urban worlds for colonizer and colonized. The counter-insurgency strategies devised
for Delhi in the last decades of imperial rule demonstrate the ways in which colonial urbanism
incorporated differently configured parts of the city into unitary schemes of control.
While Legg’s book on Delhi shows how colonial urbanism functioned by spatializing social
hierarchies, his subsequent research on sex work in Delhi alludes to other dimensions of
colonial segregation. One recent article sketches the development of prostitution policy in
colonial Delhi.26 The nineteenth-century enclosure and housing of prostitutes within
particular zones of the city sought to regulate the access of soldiers to sex and its presumed
health risks. With the city’s expansion after its 1911 designation as the capital, however,
political authority was fractured across several jurisdictional divisions. In response,
administrators sought to disseminate anti-prostitution propaganda and canalize sex work into

26
S. Legg, ‘Governing prostitution in colonial tional hygiene (1864–1939)’, Social History, XXXIV,
Delhi: from cantonment regulations to interna- 4 (2009), 447–67.
490 Social History vol. 36 : no. 4
particular zones. The developing repertoire of colonial urbanism combined practices of
segregation of space with a focus on controlling city-dwellers’ bodies and sentiments.
Ashwini Tambe’s work on prostitution in Bombay elaborates the picture of colonial
segregation and regulation.27 Tambe charts the development of a controlled enclave for
European sex workers in the area of Kamathipura during the late nineteenth century (58). This
expanded an established state policy of regulating European soldiers’ access to sex.28 Tambe
also details the location and practices of Indian sex workers, who were subject to a lesser
degree of state surveillance (98–9). Both Indian and European sex workers were located in
Kamathipura, other segregated zones dedicated to prostitution and working-class native areas
(61–3, 95). Research on sex work by Tambe and Legg underscores the importance of social
segregation in colonial urban policies.
Several key idioms of urban governance in British India – military fortification, zoning and
residential segregation, construction and improvement projects, public health and sanitation,
policing and counter-insurgency, control of bodies and sexuality – combined to regulate the
lives of urban populations within changing city spaces. It is notable, however, that those
technologies of state that rendered South Asian cities spaces of social control were similar not only
across colonial contexts but also across many urban areas globally. While timelines vary
geographically, by roughly the turn of the nineteenth century cities and urbanism were prime
spaces and technologies for producing disciplined societies.29 While notions of racial difference
were crucial in the production of class in South Asian colonial cities, they were also significant
in ostensibly non-colonial (or no longer colonial) locations in Europe and the Americas. If the
preservation of racial difference was a characteristic element of colonial urbanist discourse, then
urban power took on ‘colonial’ characteristics in metropolitan areas with ambivalent relations
to imperial forms. As such, scholarship on South Asia and other colonized places provides a
useful touchstone for research on changing modes of urban governance as one of several
technologies of control that upset the presumed flow of ideas and power from metropole to
colony.30
In the history of South Asian colonial urbanism, the city’s emergence as a space of social
control was simultaneous with its emergence as a space of autonomy. Because of the particular
history of devolution of colonial authority from precisely the moment ‘the municipal’ became
a locus of power, the period from the 1880s onwards saw increasing native formal and informal
urban authority. The decades around 1900 represent a key transition or culmination of colonial
urbanist projects.31

27
Tambe, op. cit.
28
Colonial restrictions on interracial sex were
already in place. See Ballhatchet, op. cit.
29
This trend is visible globally. See, inter alia, P.
Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the
Modern City (London, 2003); Rabinow, op. cit.;
and G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in
the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society
(Oxford, 1971).
30
For other work that recasts the history and
directionality of intellectual flows in this context
see, on South Asia, R. V. Mongia, ‘Race,
nationality, mobility: a history of the passport’,
Public Culture, XI, 3 (1999), 527–56; and C.
Sengoopta, Imprint of the Raj: How Fingerprinting
Was Born in Colonial India (London, 2003). On the
unified cultural terrain across empire, see K.
Wilson (ed.), A New Imperial History: Culture,
Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire,
1660–1840 (Cambridge, 2004).
31
Kidambi, op. cit., argues that earnest colonial
intervention in native localities began in the 1890s
(chap. 3). Chattopadhyay, op. cit., eschews chron-
ology, but identifies contestations and colonial
pressure regarding the use of ‘public space’ in
Calcutta in the 1880s (20, 137), and cites texts from
November 2011 Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities 491

CITIES AS SPACES OF AUTONOMY

During the second half of the nineteenth century, a novel unit of political engagement – the
municipality – emerged on to the global political scene. This new terrain of politics was
indelibly transnational in that ‘networked transformations in municipal regulatory frameworks’
linked together cities in Australia, Europe, North America, India, South Africa and
elsewhere.32 Just as British officials were refining colonial urbanism as an ensemble of
techniques for social control, municipalities in the subcontinent were becoming authorized
arenas for elite native political participation. Municipal power was integral to a broader
transition that opened local and eventually provincial spheres for Indian self-government, cast
by the Raj as institutional democratization.33 The successful nationalist movements that
resulted in the decolonization of the subcontinent are often regarded as the culmination of
these processes. The simultaneous emergence of cities as spaces of social control and of political
autonomy, however, traced a number of trajectories that are not easily reduced to victorious
nationalisms.
Urban space, as detailed above, was a staging ground for colonial disciplinary violence and
‘improvement’ projects. Cities also evidenced the ambivalence of late colonial power, the
increasing agency of the colonized in negotiating the political order, and the emergence of
protean anti- and counter-colonial movements. Recent scholarship helps situate cities as sites
where the transition from colonial domination to native elite power took place. It also offers
evidence of political movements, social practices and transnational connections engendered by
the development of the city, as municipal entity and as inhabited space. This section attempts
to draw out some of these connections, first by situating cities as spaces of formal political
autonomy.
The gradual and fitful process of the colonial devolution of institutional power reinvented
the South Asian city as a space of political negotiation. From the mid-nineteenth century, local
leaders could sit on municipal bodies, which gained formal legal authority with Viceroy
Ripon’s 1882 resolution. Indians were often restricted to half or fewer of the seats on
municipal boards, and the franchise was limited by property ownership and other factors.
Nevertheless, by 1882 the municipality was, in principle, a venue for the formal political
participation of colonial subjects.34
Elites dominated the municipal sphere of government from its emergence. As Kidambi
shows for Bombay, Ripon’s policy resulted in the 1888 reforms of the Bombay Municipal
Corporation that gave a greater stake to Indians in the body.35 Dominant Indian elites often
shared interests or colluded with colonizers in urban policy-making. Douglas Haynes’s work

1880 and 1900 as exemplary of British and Bengali
discourses of space ‘crossing paths’ and articulating
competing claims (275). The processes of urban
governance, suggests Glover, op. cit., that were
designed to ‘make Lahore modern’, occurred
between c. 1860 and 1910.
32
Andrew Brown-May, ‘In the precincts of the
global city: the transnational network of municipal
affairs in Melbourne, Australia at the turn of the
nineteenth century’ in P.-Y. Saunier and S. Ewen
(eds), Another Global City: Historical Explorations
into the Transnational Municipal Movement, 1850–
2000 (London, 2008), 21.
33
For a concise and unequivocal account of the
cynicism and economic self-interest that drove
colonial reforms, see S. Sarkar, Modern India, 1885–
1947 (Delhi, 1983).
34
See J. G. Leonard, ‘Urban government under
the Raj: a case study of municipal administration
in nineteenth-century south India’, Modern Asian
Studies, VII, 2 (1973), 227–51.
35
Kidambi, op. cit., 48.
492 Social History vol. 36 : no. 4
on Surat provides a detailed account of how elections in the municipal sphere from 1883
resulted in the dominance of English-educated elites and a small group of older Gujarati elite
families.36
Throughout the latter decades of British colonial rule in the subcontinent, as spheres for
Indian political participation expanded, the urban arena retained a crucial position. The
gradual democratization of colonial administration, especially in the municipal sphere,
continued with the Government of India Acts of 1909, 1919 and 1935. Municipal boards and
government units at the local and district levels served as crucial venues for the elaboration of
nationalist political demands.37
The case of Bombay bears out the role of urban institutions and political networks in the
articulation of anti-colonial positions. Against a background of the colonial city as space of
segregation and social control, Sandip Hazareesingh’s work examines confrontations over
urban policies that shaped Bombay from the First World War through decolonization.38 He
thematizes the late colonial period in Bombay as a struggle in which capitalist
developmentalism won out over an emergent, globally mediated language of ‘urban
citizenship’. In describing the context of these developments, Hazareesingh presents the city
as an authorized space for contesting and negotiating the colonial present and possible political
futures in South Asia. A key focus here is on the political possibilities voiced in the Bombay
Chronicle by its activist editor B. G. Horniman (83–4). Hazareesingh contemplates the
convergence represented by a brief alliance of Horniman with M. K. Gandhi, uniting an urban
agenda addressing questions of labour, housing and transportation with nationalist resistance to
arbitrary colonial laws (110, 124–5). Horniman’s deportation and Gandhi’s retreat from mass
mobilization strategies represent to Hazareesingh the denouement of ‘the quest of urban
citizenship’ as a political horizon in the late colonial moment (139, 147–8, chapter 4).
Hazareesingh’s work covers events in Gandhian politics that are touchstones in any narrative
of the history of South Asian nationalism. He provides a fresh interpretative context by
embedding this history firmly within the urban political scene of Bombay. Such a view relies
upon an understanding of the late colonial city as an autonomous and ambivalent space that
was the subject of political struggles, rather than merely their location. This perspective on
nationalism has important stakes for rethinking late colonial politics. Hazareesingh suggests that
participants saw the struggle for the city as integral to the fight for the nation-state, and
Gandhi’s rural emphasis in his vision of Swarajya (‘self-rule’) appears as one strategy within a
broader political language. The threat Horniman’s Chronicle posed was less in its abstract
emphasis on home rule than in its ‘critiques of the urban colonial regime [that] offered practical
insights into how Swarajya might be lived locally’ (119). Hazareesingh’s take on the
increasingly autonomous urban domain as constitutive of politics, rather than an incidental
location, breaks down understandings of nationalism by reinserting the productivity of specific
cities.
Seeing the urban itself as foundational in the making of politics does more than broaden the
thematic scope of nationalism in British India. Such an orientation can underscore the
subcontinent’s embeddedness in transnational networks of various kinds. While a public sphere
centred on the press and pamphlets was emerging in wartime Bombay, the newspaper format

36 38
Haynes, op. cit., 116, 150–2. Hazareesingh, op. cit., chap. 1.
37
Masselos, Towards Nationalism, op. cit.
November 2011 Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities 493
was becoming a key global technology for political protest (107). Hazareesingh casts Bombay
within a transnational framework, locating Horniman among ‘international movements for
social change’ around urban questions (122). While more suggestive and gestural than the
empirically grounded narratives that make up the early sections of the books, Hazareesingh’s
final chapter situates ‘urban citizenship’ and ‘civic rights’ movements within a transnational
history of labour activism and urban progressivism (chapter 4; see especially 212–16).
Hazareesingh’s history of Bombay presents a counter-narrative of South Asian nationalism. By
rigorously contextualizing his account within a key city in the independence movement, he
both demonstrates the importance of the urban as space of political autonomy and indicates the
relevance of transnational political ideas in this development.
If the nationalist movement was embedded within formal political spaces in Bombay, other
examples suggest that informal arenas of urban power were also crucial domains of autonomy
in colonial South Asia. Legg’s work casts Delhi as a fundamentally negotiated space, of which
the municipal domain was one arena.39 Imperial Delhi was the site of intensive building
activity, boundary-making and military repression during the early twentieth century. Each of
these aspects of the capital’s construction and consolidation was fiercely debated by city-
dwellers and officials in formal and informal arenas. The competing interests of the partly
Indianized Old Delhi Municipal Corporation (DMC) and imperially dominated New Delhi
body (NDMC) provided a framework for the playing out of competing visions of the city.
Despite New Delhi’s dominance in the urban area, contestations over improvement projects
reveal a tangle of municipal bodies that created openings for Indian nationalist elites as well as
common city-dwellers to complicate the workings of colonial urbanism. A project to demolish
a section of the old city wall, adjacent to New Delhi, and perform ‘slum clearance’ elicited
official and popular challenges to the plan itself and other specific elements. The scheme was
first proposed in the 1860s and renewed in 1889, but varied forms of opposition delayed the
demolition through its reintroduction in the 1920s into the following decade (190–200). Legg’s
account of the debates, including a revealing discussion of the varied public representations of
the symbolic meaning of the wall, shows how the urban terrain emerged as a site of multilateral
negotiation in the late colonial period (198–9).
Negotiations over the city proliferated beneath the level of formal politics. Public sphere
representations, informal engagements of city-dwellers with the state and urban practices
produced and occupied spaces of autonomy within the colonial city. Legg suggests that
petitions filed during the 1910s and 1920s – demands of state employees for accommodation or
rent allowance and requests for compensation by the displaced or evicted – formed a ‘counter-
discourse’ to the colonial state’s urbanist project (66–70). Practices that remade the ‘lived space’
of the city – such as hijacking of lighting supplies or keeping livestock in government
quarters – supplemented entreaties to officials by actively ‘resist[ing] the hierarchies embedded
in the city’ (74–5). Legg’s work provides brief glimpses at rarely visible interventions into the
making of colonial Delhi. While difficult to account for in a systematic fashion, this domain of
urban political engagement and practice is analytically indispensable. It provides a basis for
thinking beyond the powerful ordering impulse of colonial urbanist technologies of control
such as those considered in the previous section. Further, focus on everyday practices reveals

39
Legg, Spaces, op. cit.
494 Social History vol. 36 : no. 4
non-elite interventions in the late colonial city, parallel to the formal political domain of elites
who entered into, and later inherited, the institutions of colonial urbanism.40
Substantial consideration of urban structures and practices of the city might supplement a
narrative seeking to move beyond elite urbanist ideologies (whether colonial or nationalist) in
conceiving the South Asian city. One such gesture is Glover’s account of the bungalow as a
key component of the colonial city.41 Writing against Anthony King’s landmark work on the
bungalow as a trans-imperial domestic form,42 Glover unsettles the narrative of an effectively
flattened and pacified colonial world. His analysis of literary texts, memoirs and official
housing reports reveals the ‘disquieting’ effect of the bungalow on many colonial observers.
The anxiety he locates was induced by a gnawing sense that the Indian iteration of the
dwelling – constructed out of local building materials and embedded in Indian landscapes –
‘was more naturally suited to Indian communities than it was to the British community’ (181).
Glover claims that Indian, rather than British, propriety was ‘true of most of the new spaces in
the colonial city’ (181). As such, colonial urbanism – the ensemble of disciplinary regimes it
constituted, the modes of intervention it worked through – produced unintended
consequences and was subject to frequent and, at times, thorough reversals. In effect, the
very spaces of colonial comfort in the heart of a segregated elite zone undermined the imperial
project.
The thematization of the colonial city as a space of autonomy and ambivalence is not
conducive to the kind of structural accounting as the city seen as space of control. Taken
together, however, these aspects of colonial urbanism’s identity allow us to reassess received
models, suggest other angles of approach, sketch a loose chronology, and trace postcolonial
legacies and continuities.

CONCLUSION: TRAJECTORIES, GENEALOGIES AND BOUNDARIES OF

COLONIAL URBANISM
Colonial urbanism provided a powerful evolving repertoire of technologies for social control,
and opened emerging autonomous or ambivalent spaces for articulations of competing visions
for the city. In some of its idioms, such as the technology of public health and sanitation,
colonial urbanism worked both as an instrument for social control and as a project of
progressive urban politics. Indeed, a crucial aspect of South Asia’s modern urban history is
the simultaneity of the city’s formation as space of control and as space of autonomy. In the
decades around the turn of the nineteenth century two clear tendencies are in evidence: the
colonial state’s consolidation of disciplinary regimes across the terrain of the city, and
the emergence of the urban as a venue and topic for negotiation and contestation between and
among colonizers, South Asian elites and common city-dwellers.
The chronology and characteristic features of the city’s life as a space of control can be roughly
sketched. From the mid-eighteenth century, colonial cities developed as military, and later
civil and residential, European zones, fortified by material structures and state violence against

40
Chattopadhyay emphasizes that Calcutta’s spaces
of autonomy were foundational in the articulation
of an elitist and patriarchal nationalist urban
regime.
41
Glover, op. cit., chap. 5.
42
A. D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a
Global Culture, 2nd edn (New York, 1995).
November 2011 Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities 495
areas populated by the colonized poor. Boundaries between ‘white town’ and ‘black town’
were hardly hermetic, as colonial texts suggested. Numerous practices – including burial,
commerce and labour – crossed implicit boundaries.43 Nevertheless, the segregated city, with
multiple zones rather than dual ‘halves’, provided a conceptual template for colonial urbanism
that structured the making and regulation of space. From the mid-nineteenth century
onwards, poorer city-dwellers were systematically subjected to a developing repertoire of
urban discipline. This entailed building and improvement projects laden with the symbolism of
colonial civilizing and extensive campaigns to ensure public health and sanitation. Whereas the
military and police regulated boundaries in an earlier era, construction projects and sanitation
initiatives subjected entire cities to governance. There was a shift in state orientation from
containment of disorderly spaces to regulation of threatening bodies: from divided to
disciplined city.44 Throughout these changes, colonial urbanism consistently organized the
population by segregation of space.
Production and regulation of space continues to frame state urbanism in postcolonial South
Asia. Material from the late colonial period, during which an elite administrative cadre of
colonial subjects was emerging, helps historicize the contemporary urban condition. Legg’s
work on the twentieth-century remaking of Delhi highlights the relationship between the
elite – initially British but steadily Indianizing – government city of New Delhi and the largely
poor Old Delhi, which was increasingly marginalized in urban politics by the new capital.45
Legg notes the structures and methods of policing the two entities, but shows that ‘they were
united by forms of government and discipline that prioritized the urban elite’ (117). In the
1910s, this group was still predominantly European, and housing preference for government
employees based on rank masked a racialized, bourgeois urban geography of residential
segregation (46, 51). With increases in Indian posts and occupational ranks over the following
decades, by the late 1930s racial segregation had been largely overwritten by class segregation
(53–4).46 Scholarship on contemporary South Asian cities bears out the endurance of this shift,
and the continuity of spatial segregation.47 The characteristic modes of power that guaranteed
British racial dominance in the colonial era – military and police presence, zoning and
43
See Brown, op. cit., on cemeteries; Chattopad- colonial bourgeoisies (74–6). On the production of
hyay, op. cit, on servants (126–32); and J. Heitz- elite space in postcolonial Calcutta see D.
man, The City in South Asia (London, 2008), 118– Chakrabarty, ‘Of garbage, modernity, and the
23, on commercial activity. citizen’s gaze’ in Habitations of Modernity: Essays in
44
On this shift, see I. Pande, Medicine, Race and the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago, 2002), 65–
Liberalism in British Bengal: Symptoms of Empire 79; S. Kaviraj, ‘Filth and the public sphere:
(London, 2009), chaps 5, 6. concepts and practices about space in Calcutta’,
45
Legg, Spaces, op. cit. Public Culture, X, 1 (1997), 83–113; and A. Roy
46
On state targeting of lower-class groups during ‘The gentleman’s city: urban informality in the
the inter-war period and the emergence of Calcutta of new communism’ in A. Roy and N.
middle-class dominance in urban politics, see N. AlSayyad (eds), Urban Informality: Transnational
Gooptu, The Politics of the Urban Poor in Early Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and
Twentieth-Century India (Cambridge, 2001), 14–15, South Asia (Lanham, MD, 2004). For Mumbai, see
18. J. S. Anjaria, ‘Guardians of the bourgeois city:
47
See especially Nair, op. cit., on Bangalore, the citizenship, public space, and middle-class activism
locus of colonial military development and capital in Mumbai’, City and Community, VIII, 4 (2009),
investment, and the primary city in a semi- 391–406. On the segregation and stigmatization of
autonomous princely state. She accounts for sex work in contemporary Mumbai, see S. P.
bourgeois dominance of urban space, and traces Shah, ‘Producing the spectacle of Kamathipura’,
a direct continuity between colonial and post- Cultural Dynamics, XVIII, 3 (2006), 269–92.
496 Social History vol. 36 : no. 4
residential segregation, public health and sanitation as discourses for controlling sexuality and
labour – continue to produce class power and segregation along those lines in contemporary
South Asia.
The aspect of the colonial city as space of autonomy is, for historical and archival reasons, less
amenable to descriptive, thematic summarization than disciplinary urbanism. The limited
political authority Indians held in colonial period municipal governance makes it difficult to
distinguish projects clearly within this domain from the broader institutional workings of
colonial urbanism. The emergence of the municipality as an authorized site of formal political
participation by colonial subjects can be dated to the period from the 1880s onward. This
historical development was part of a key global process, only briefly considered in the literature
on colonial South Asian cities.48 Recent scholarship on municipalism, primarily in Europe, has
suggested that urbanist agendas served as platforms for bypassing national politics and co-
ordinating progressive projects transnationally.49 These early twentieth-century political
figures in Europe had their counterparts in South Asia. Urbanists in British India negotiated
what was often a far more constrained political terrain, split between a reactionary colonial
state and elite-dominated nationalist parties. Describing late colonial South Asian cities from
the perspective of urbanist connectivity may provide an avenue both to see beyond
provincializing colonial and statist nationalist networks and to examine robust global
engagements in an era before nation-states were in place. Urbanist projects might reveal cities’
ambivalent relationships with the production of colonial (or later, national) state space as a
political-economic territorializing process.50
Providing a thematic account of informal negotiations and contestations within the urban
scene is difficult owing to the scattered and limited evidence available of this level of
engagement.51 A key foundation for such an approach would be a nuanced assessment of the
ideological and material working of colonial urbanism, which takes account of its contested
character, the rise in new techniques and sites of governance, and its central role in the
organization of space.
Research into colonial South Asian urban history can provide a sense of the contexts –
transnational in scope – that constrained and enabled elite and popular participation in formal

48
While the transnational engagements of modern
South Asian urbanisms have rarely been the
explicit topic of scholarship, recent works cite
evidence for the global circulation of ideas. See
Legg (Spaces and ‘Governing prostitution’), op. cit.,
Hazareesingh, op. cit., Kidambi, op. cit. and Glover,
op. cit. On the work of urban planner Patrick
Geddes in India and internationally, see chaps 7–9
of H. E. Meller, Patrick Geddes: Social Evolutionist
and City Planner (London, 1994). See also Nair, op.
cit., 158.
49
P. Dogliani, ‘European municipalism in the first
half of the twentieth century: the socialist net-
work’, Contemporary European History, XI, 4
(November 2002), 573–96; O. Gaspari, ‘Cities
against states? Hopes, dreams and shortcomings of
the European municipal movement, 1900–1960’
in ibid., 597–621; P.-Y. Saunier, ‘Taking up the
bet on connections: a municipal contribution’ in
ibid, 507–27. See also P.-Y. Saunier, ‘Changing the
city: urban international information and the
Lyons municipality, 1900–1940’, Planning Perspec-
tives, 14 (1999), 19–48 and Saunier and Ewen (eds),
op. cit.
50
On the making of ‘state space’ in late colonial
South Asia, see M. Goswami, Producing India: From
Colonial Economy to National Space (Chicago, 2004).
51
For exemplary uses of petitions and legal records
to examine common city-dwellers, see Legg,
Spaces, op. cit., and Tambe, op. cit. For a
penetrating use of colonial texts to locate political
participation of labourers in early colonial Madras,
see A. Balachandran, ‘Of corporations and caste
heads: urban rule in company Madras, 1640–1720’,
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History, IX, 2
(2008).
November 2011 Colonial urbanism and South Asian cities 497
and informal negotiations and contestations over urban practice. These engagements, the work
of emerging institutions such as municipalities and improvement trusts, and the politics of the
city-dwelling masses shaped late colonial urban worlds and continued to be salient into the
postcolonial era. Study of the complex interplay between control and autonomy in urban
terrain might allow us more effectively to situate the voices of the people amid the structures
and practices of the colonial city.

State University of New York, Stony Brook